


standing on hallowed ground, looking up at me

by killproof



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Heavy Angst, M/M, Wakes & Funerals, mlm author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 09:13:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14257716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killproof/pseuds/killproof
Summary: There's something heavy settled in the air around him. The humidity of leftover steam trickles easily through the door, slightly ajar, and it pulls the warm flush from his cheeks along with it.“Huh,” he says aloud, eyes fixed on the door handle. He closes the door behind him when he showers─it traps the steam into a satisfying fog, pressing against his skin and leaving heat-flush imprints. Right now, he feels the tile cold under his bare feet and the prickle of goosebumps tracing the line of his shoulders.The bathroom door is open.





	standing on hallowed ground, looking up at me

**Author's Note:**

> everyone who previewed this this thinks i'm a terrible person, which is correct.
> 
> each scene is numbered, and they're placed out of order. keeping that in mind will very likely make this less confusing 
> 
> there's two very brief implications of attempted suicide, if you'd like to avoid them the line before the first is “lance starts, voice cracking slightly” and the line after it ends is “there's silence again, for a while”, then for the second it's “more vulnerable than lance expected of him” and “keith’s hands go slack against his”
> 
> title from from “ohio” by the saint johns
> 
> [fic playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/phantomsfaced/playlist/7mlsfp0RurLKqwy55jzt7Y?si=xWCQnphYRhaCIAkYnf3tMA)

iii.

When Lance steps out of the shower and _HELP_ is written on the bathroom mirror, his first thought is: _oh, okay, I've finally lost it_.

At first, he thinks─hopes?─that it's a trick of the light, but he blinks the water out of his eyes, leans closer, and it’s clear against the steam gathered on the mirror. _HELP._ Real horror movie shit, honestly, but instead of jagged and ominous it's just...handwriting. Strangely familiar in the way all-caps lettering is sometimes, though the slant and scrawl of it isn't exactly common, but Lance allows himself to brush it off as déjà vu. Something like that, at least.

Lance has not slept in what must be a good few days now, and his muscles are all heat-loose from the shower, steam still curling the hairs at the nape of his neck. He stares blankly at the mirror for a few long moments, then slowly raises his arm and wipes the letters away in one long stroke.

There's something heavy settled in the air around him. The humidity of leftover steam trickles easily through the door, slightly ajar, and it pulls the warm flush from his cheeks along with it.

“Huh,” he says aloud, eyes fixed on the door handle. He closes the door behind him when he showers─it traps the steam into a satisfying fog, pressing against his skin and leaving heat-flush imprints. Right now, he feels the tile cold under his bare feet and the prickle of goosebumps tracing the line of his shoulders.

The bathroom door is open.

He presses a damp palm to it, pushing it the rest of the way open, the hinges creaking in the silence of his apartment. Maybe it’s just because of how paranoid he’s been lately─which is ‘ _understandable’,_ according to Pidge─but it sets him on edge more than it should.

As time passes, it's starting to feel a little less understandable and a little more…pathetic. But he shakes the thought from his head as quickly as it comes, and wipes the mix of sweat and shower water from his forehead, slicking his bangs back and tightening the towel around his waist.

When he walks out of the bathroom, he does not feel alone.  
  


 

iv.

His breaking point is probably the third time there's writing on the mirror.

He slides back the shower curtain, steam furled around him, wraps a towel around his waist, and when he walks over to the mirror it's scrawled thickly into the nearly opaque fog. 

_HEY_

_ASSHOLE_

Lance scoffs, nose wrinkling. He presses his hand, middle finger extended, to the mirror so when he pulls back it's outlined against the slowly dissipating steam. It's more performatory than anything─it isn't like mirror notes are his only way of communicating with the apparent _ghost_ in his apartment.

“Okay,” he announces to the bathroom walls. “If you're here, I’d like you to know I’m offended.” He frowns at the mirror, watching as lines are lethargically traced against the steam.

_WHY_

“You called me an asshole,” he points out, trying not to think too hard about the fact that he's talking to a _ghost_ right now.

 _YOU ARE,_ said ghost traces clumsily onto the last remnants of fog on the mirror. The letters drip down, rivulets from the previous messages (and the tasteful imprint of Lance’s middle finger) slowly washing it away.

Lance’s eyes flicker back to the center of the mirror, and he sucks in a breath when he can see the faint, grayish outline of someone standing next to him.

He tracks the movement as the shadow shifts, the form of what might be a hand reaching out to press against the mirror. It leaves the dewy imprint of fingertips, hand dragging droplets of water down against the sink before the outline disappears entirely from the mirror, and Lance can breathe again.

 

 

 

iv.

The last time Lance sees Keith is two weeks before his birthday.

That's what it says on the missing person report; filed away somewhere in the Flagstaff Police Department, collecting dust. Lance remembers sitting at the officer’s desk way out in backwater county, sometime around two in the morning, watching blankly as the report was typed up. Shiro had shown up at his apartment at midnight on October fifteenth, the forty-eighth hour Keith had been gone, and he didn't need to explain himself, not really. Lance had just nodded in understanding, grabbing his coat, and they'd ended up with Hunk, Pidge, and Allura at the station until sunrise talking to officers. Lance had been the last one to see him, and he'd ended up at a desk giving his statement under bare fluorescent bulbs that washed his skin out to a strange brown-gray while the others waited in the lobby.

The officer shook his hand after, clasping just a bit too tight and giving Lance a smile sickeningly tinged with pity. _“Thanks for coming in, kid,”_ he remembers her saying, smile still plastered on as Lance mechanically shook back, hanging on a few moments too long after her vice-tight grip had loosened. _“We’ll be doing our best to find your friend.”_ Lance had nodded, letting go, arms hanging at his sides like a puppet without a marionette. He had walked back out to the others in the lobby, feeling hollow and strange, and  when Hunk wrapped his arms around him and Allura leaned her head against his shoulder with Pidge dozing off on her lap, he realized how badly he'd been shaking.

He’d gone home, because there wasn't really anything else he _could_ do. Shiro had given him a strained smile and told him to get some sleep when he’d climbed out of the passenger side in front of his building. Hunk and Allura were already snoring quietly in the backseat, Pidge’s face lit up in electric blues as she typed away on her phone, brow creased with a kind of stress Lance thinks should have never been able to find home in a fourteen-year-old. He knows that this thought will keep him up too late to grasp at anything resembling sleep, but he forces a smile and tells Shiro not to worry about him, anyway.

There are a lot of things that keep him up that night. The look in Shiro’s eyes when he came to Lance’s apartment at midnight, the pure exhaustion on Hunk and Allura’s faces, the worry etched into Pidge’s expression─the police report, black letters glowing on a white screen. He can still see the writing behind closed eyelids, something that haunted him about the finality of it. _Date last seen: October 12th, 9:37 P.M., by Lance McClain._

Part of him wishes he didn't remember as much of the twelfth as he does. He doesn't exactly have a photographic memory, but when he thinks back to that day─he can feel each part of it almost in his bones, in his chest, _digging_ for what went wrong.

Sitting in the back corner of Altea Café, Keith had been the least excited Lance has seen anyone look with a birthday drawing near. He remembers prodding his shoulder obnoxiously, grinning wide and feeling it falter when Keith’s expression had remained marble-cold. Keith had never quite mastered tamping down smiles─his cheeks puckered when he bit the insides to stop the quirk of his lips, almost like dimples, and Lance could always tell. He remembers searching for it, then; the curve of his face had been still and smooth. Like Grecian statues from the museums Keith would drag him to every so often, the ones he would stare at like there was something impossibly enthralling in the stone-frozen expressions and curves of anatomy.

In that moment, Lance felt like he understood the fascination, in a morbid sort of way. He searched the memory branded onto his prefrontal lobe, trying to find some sort of answer in the rolled-forward hunch of Keith’s shoulders, the stillness of his expression.

Lance remembers him leaving the café early, though barely any of them had seen him for the better part of the month and Lance had only caught him there by happenstance. When Lance had curled his hand around Keith’s wrist and asked where he was going, he'd blinked wide, dark eyes at him, as if he didn't expect him to _care,_ and shaken his hand off, never responding as he walked out the door. Lance hadn't noticed the heavy bags under his eyes, or how his sweatshirt sleeves were tugged carefully against his wrists until he was already gone. He tells Shiro this, later, and it is not a surprise, but Lance still feels nauseous guilt pooling in his gut whenever he thinks about it.

His name is on the police report.

The sick feeling in his stomach never goes away.

  
  


vi.

The thing about being haunted is you can't find anywhere to be alone.

He's in his room, legs tucked up to his chest and face buried uncomfortably against his knees when he hears the doorknob turning. He doesn't move to get up, or look, just lets it happen; he can feel the heavy presence of it when the ghost settles next to him on the bed. They feel strangely hesitant.

“Now who's the asshole,” Lance manages hoarsely after a few long moments. “I'm _grieving,_ you dick.”

The ghost, unsurprisingly, says nothing. Everything about communication with them has been picky, fluctuating at best. Lance can hear a faint whisper, can see the flicker of a shadow, but─it's always in his periphery. Out of reach. Taunting. If this is the hell it feels like, he is Tantalus; continually reaching towards something he will never be able to grasp.

After a moment drenched in silence, he speaks again.

“I told you about my friend, right?” The faint brush of fingers against his hand, still wrapped around his knees, curling into himself. Silent response. _Yes._ Lance sniffs, turns a wet cheek to press against his knee, staring distantly into eyes he isn't sure are there. A faint blur. Confirmation. _Go on._

“We had a funeral,” he says, even though he knows he's already told them. It feels a bit like talking to no one, but he figures he's already halfway off the deep end─might as well dive the rest of the way in. “They usually make you wait a while until they say the missing person’s dead for sure, but it was...a special case. _‘Abnormal behavior before disappearance’._ Something formal-sounding like that.” He lets out a watery laugh. “I still think that's dumb. He was never… _not_ weird. Just weirder this time.” He stops a moment. The silence drags for what feels like more than the few seconds it is. “He never disappeared before, though. I guess that's the abnormal part.”

There's a soft hiss of air that almost sounds like laughter, if Lance strains his hearing hard enough. The phantom sensation of a hand brushes against his shoulder tentatively.

“I think,” Lance starts, voice cracking slightly and the beginnings of new tears pooling in his eyes already. “What─what makes this all _worse_ is he tried to…y’know. A couple years ago.” He pauses, sniffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve messily. At this point, he's sort of past caring. “It wasn't _good,_ but he ended up being okay, and I just─I keep feeling like─”

 _“Like he's going to be okay again.”_ A whisper-thin voice finishes for him. Lance buries his face against his knees again, nodding. There's silence again, for a while, and it's not quite clear if the ghost isn't talking or whatever they're saying isn't coming through.

After a few long moments, Lance feels arms wrap around him. It feels…strangely warm, and probably more comforting than a ghost hug _should_ feel, but he's exhausted and sad so he doesn't stop himself from going slack against the body pressed to his back, eyes slipping shut.

He doesn't know exactly when he fell asleep, but when he opens his eyes again, sunlight is streaming through the shades and he's wrapped up in blankets. He wonders vaguely if it was just a dream.

A lot of things have felt unreal, lately.

  
  


v.

So maybe he caves and buys a ouija board.

It's not like Lance has ever shied away from the supernatural. He's been superstitious ever since he can remember; rosary tucked into his jacket pocket, maybe a few more questions to his neighborhood church’s priest about ghosts than was considered normal, and if he made Pidge sage her house when the lights kept flickering strangely, well─that was his business.

Their friend group had always been split fairly even on the existence of ghosts; Keith and Lance on far ends of belief and disbelief, the others dispersed somewhere in between with varying levels of enthusiasm when it came to defending their opinions. Keith had always been the one to roll his eyes when Lance talked about ghosts, and…okay, admittedly it was fun to argue with him about it. He remembers, far too distinctly for comfort, how he had told Keith that he hoped he became a ghost just to prove himself wrong.

The memory of Keith’s laughter and responding ‘ _sure, I’ll make sure I haunt you’_ no longer pulls a smile to his lips, but when he unfolds the ouija board on the floor of his bedroom, he sits back on his heels and tries to forget about the prospect entirely. _Maybe my ghost knows Keith,_ he thinks, almost bitterly. _Ghost buddies. God, he would hate that._

Realistically, if Keith was a ghost, Lance would've known from the second he brought the ouija board into the apartment, because Keith would have laughed his ass off about it. Lance had solemnly sworn off direct communication with spirits, always trying to explain how it invited them into your life, and Keith had just cracked a smile and listened to him ramble like it was something particularly amusing. It's a strange sort of nostalgia, thinking about this, and it brings a tightness to Lance’s chest.

He flattens his hands against the board, smoothing it against the hardwood of his floor, and places the planchette at the center of the board. The thin wood is almost cold against his fingertips, and he catches himself wondering if the ghost is already here. If they'd seen him bring the board through the front door and followed, watching him unpack it and set up. The idea of ghostly eyes tracking him sends a shiver coursing through his limbs, and his hands shake where they're lightly touched to the planchette.

“Okay, um,” he starts nervously, shifting his legs so they're folded under him. “Is there anyone in here with me?” He asks. The heaviness from the bathroom seems to settle around him again; Lance remembers reading and hearing people's descriptions of supernatural experiences, and how they'd felt a sense of dread whenever the ghost was around. The heavy feeling is not dread, but…some sort of fuzziness. Like being draped in a blanket.

Lance startles when he feels his hands moving, and he breathes in sharply when he looks down and the planchette is settling over _YES_ on the board.

“Okay. Fuck, okay,” he says, stricken. “Who are you?” He asks. The planchette almost hesitates, but begins moving again not long after he finishes the sentence, and slowly begins spelling out something on the alphabet marked into the board.

_C-A-N-T-R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R_

“Oh,” Lance says, suddenly realizing how disorienting death must be. “I'm sorry.”

_I-T-S-O-K_

“I mean─it's not,” he says, pushing away the strangeness of talking to someone he can't see. “You're dead. That sucks.”

_W-O-W-I-D-I-D-N-T-R-E-A-L-I-_

“Alright, alright!” Lance interrupts, laughing a little. “Sorry. So, um, why are you in my apartment?” He asks, and the planchette lays still so long he's almost worried he scared them off, but it begins moving again after a moment.

_I-D-K_

Lance can't help but let out a snort at that. Not really _bad,_ but─he's talking to a ghost, through a ouija board, and they're using _chatspeak._ It's one of the more surreal moments of his life.

“Guess you didn't die super long ago, then.” He says. The planchette moves to _YES_ in agreement. “How…how long _have_ you been dead?”

_R-E-C-E-N-T_

Another pause─shorter this time, almost faltering.

_N-O-T-S-U-R-E_

The answer is almost frustratingly vague, and Lance furrows his brow. To their credit, the ghost is giving him as much information as they can for someone who must still be lost in the adjustment to the fact that they are no longer living. He still wishes he could get more answers.

“Today's November twentieth, if that helps.” He offers. The planchette darts to _YES_ in response, then begins to spell something else out.

_O-C-T-O-B-E-R_

“Do─do you know the date?” Lance asks, hands unsteady. The silence that follows is crushing, and as he waits for the answer he tries not to hope. After a long moment, The planchette slides to _NO._ Somehow, Lance can feel the regret in the action, like the ghost’s reluctance to let him down in palpable in the air.

“It's okay,” he assures them quickly. “How about…hm. How old were you?”

_1-8_

Lance almost responds, but the planchette quickly darts back up to the letters on the board.

_B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y_

“Birthday?” He repeats. “Was─it was your birthday, when you died?” His heart thumps insistently against his ribcage. The planchette moves to _NO_ again, a frustrated energy dragging along with it, then spells out:

_W-A-S-C-L-O-S-E_

“So…that makes you nineteen now, technically.” Lance says, and tries not the think about October twelfth, two weeks before Keith’s birthday─

_I-G-U-E-S-S_

The ghost interrupts, but Lance can't be bothered to care too much when he feels someone else’s fingertips brush against his as the planchette is returned to the center of the board.

“Whoa,” he breathes, staring down at his hands. “I felt that.”

 _“That’s weird,”_ A voice suddenly says, and Lance yelps, nearly jerking his hands back from the board.

“Holy _shit!”_ He shouts, his head jerking up towards the source of the noise, and─there's nothing. Just his bedroom wall, painted blue, in front of him.

 _“Could you hear that?”_ The voice asks, clearer this time, and Lance shudders. There's an echo coursing through it, distorting it, but the ghost’s voice is low and smooth. When he looks more carefully at the wall, there's a blur of something all heat-wavy in front of him, and he can trace the form of hands laying on the other side of the planchette.

“Yeah,” he says, almost uncomprehending, and slowly raises one arm toward the _someone_ in front of him. He lets out a startled laugh when his fingertips brush the distinct tip of a nose. “Holy fuck, this is happening.”

 _“Guess so,”_ the voice says, still disembodied despite the solidness of their form, an amused tinge to their tone audible through the distortion.

“Whoa,” Lance breathes, grinning. “Ghosts _are_ real.” There's a break of disembodied laughter, hazy through the echo, and they speak up again.

 _“The mirror shit didn't convince you?”_ They ask, sounding amused. Lance smiles sheepishly.

“I sort of thought I was just losing it,” he admits, and, trying not to think about it too hard, says: “My best friend, um─went missing, a while ago.”

A beat. Silence.

“We had a funeral.”

 _“I'm sorry,”_ The voice says, genuine grief laced through their tone as if they had been just as close to Keith, had gone through all the chaos of the past two months along with Lance and the rest of them.

“S’okay,” Lance mumbles, biting back tears. “Hey, maybe you know him?” He offers weakly.

 _“I only know you,”_ they say, blunt and simple. Silence drags on between them for a few moments, before they speak again. _“Thanks, Lance.”_ They say, softer than before. Lance jumps at the sound of his name, staring wide-eyed at the glassy blur in front of him.

“For─for what?” He asks, too surprised that they knew his name already to form any coherent question about it.

 _“I don't know,”_ they say, almost thoughtful. _“For talking to me, I guess.”_

“Oh…oh. Well, no problem.”

 _“Still,”_ they press on. _“Thanks.”_ Lance doesn't know why, but the tone and sincerity of it makes something squeeze in his chest. He does not think about how their voice almost sounds like Keith through the echo.

The last stage of grief is acceptance. This, Lance knows, is not acceptance.

  
  


ii.

There is no coroner’s report delivered along with the final statements from the police.

 _No body,_ the officer tells Shiro. _Never a body, with cases like these._

What they _do_ get is a long explanation of how normally a person has to be missing much longer for an official death to be declared, but given extenuating circumstances─ _extenuating circumstances my ass,_ Lance thinks privately─they were issued a final report. Honestly, he just thinks it's laziness. The only real _extenuating circumstances_ are Keith’s behavior before the disappearance being dubbed _‘abnormal’,_ his mental health track record, and a distant neighbor’s claim to having seen someone out on the precipice of the canyon.

Lance prefers not to dwell on her description of the person she saw─grey sweatshirt, black-brown hair washed in moonlight.

They never find anything out in the canyon. Lance tries not to wonder about it, and Keith’s coffin remains empty at the funeral.

Here's the thing: Lance has been to plenty of funerals. That's what happens when your parents know a lot of people and you have family distant enough to not know well but close enough to receive notice of their death─you go to a lot of strangely impersonal funerals. Always hiding out by the food, dodging conversation with relatives and neighbors, full of white flowers and black fabric and empty condolences. One he remembers particularly is his great-something’s funeral he went to as a kid; how the open-casket affair had still been something new and interesting, how he'd approached the coffin in his neatly tailored suit with bright eyes and taken a second to understand the significance of it all.

The things he remembers most are strange, sometimes, but he understands exactly why this time. Even after a mortician’s no doubt careful tidying, their veins had been brightly blue even beneath their death-greyed tan skin, silent and arranged, and it stuck against his memory like an ugly refrigerator magnet.

At the wake, Lance stares at the closed-lid coffin instead of greeting the guests, trying to imagine Keith beneath the wood; appearing asleep except for the pallor of his skin, like the open-casket he still remembers. The suit he’d put on that morning was overly stiff, far past uncomfortable by the time they got to the wake, and he fidgets restlessly in his spot. He, Shiro, Hunk, Pidge, and Allura were all lined up next to the coffin while people came up to play their respects, giving forced smiles in response to painfully sympathetic condolences. Lance is sort of tired of it by now─the thing that began to grate on his nerves wasn't the pity, but the fact that he _knows_ a good handful of the people dramatically wiping away tears couldn't have given less of a shit about Keith before today.

It isn't that he didn't _know_ some people liked to take the death of someone they knew even distantly and pretend it affected them drastically so they could have the sympathy with none of the grief─he just really, _really_ wants to punch them for it, now. He knows that half of the people here probably never spoke to Keith more than once, and he thinks that he's not as mad about it for himself as he is for the rest of them.

For how Shiro reads a speech with a tiredness in his eyes that Lance knows sleep cannot fix, how Pidge’s fingernails dig into her palms a little tighter whenever she glances at the coffin, how Hunk keeps darting away to the bathroom and comes back with eyes wet and red-rimmed, how Allura has seemed one good push from breaking down the whole day. How he's certain that no one else here probably even knows that there is no one in the coffin.

He tugs at the sleeve of his suit, and tries not to imagine Keith’s voice complaining about formalwear next to him.

  
  


viii.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” He says one morning, apropos of nothing, when he notices a shifting blur across the counter from him.

It's been about a week since he'd made the attempt with the ouija board, half that since he had the strange dream, and the pieces have slowly begun to fit together in a way he…well. He's scared of being wrong.

The blurred shape’s agitated movement stills; if Lance focuses,  he can almost see the outline of Keith staring back at him, and he's not sure whether or not his imagination is to blame for it.

 _“You're gonna have to be more specific than that,”_ they say after a drawn-out silence, but the echo is nearly wiped from their voice, and Lance _knows._

“...Keith?” He asks, hesitant.

The air changes, spiking cold, and in a sudden flash, Lance sees Keith standing across the counter.

His body could barely be called opaque, translucent and distinctly ghostly. Lance can nearly see the outline of his kitchen cabinets behind him, but it's hard to concentrate on anything when it's _Keith._ Standing there casually, as if Lance had invited him over and they were just hanging out. He's peering at Lance with dark, curious eyes, a familiar warm brown through the haze of liminality. His hair is in waves, how it always was dried from the pool or the lake, curling slightly at the ends.

There's something distinctly terrible about the fact that he's wearing the same clothes Lance last saw him in. It's probably what breaks the dam.

Lance chokes, clapping both hands over his mouth and feeling tears begin to spill hot over his cheeks without warning. Keith smiles gently, probably trying for soothing, but the movement is so painfully familiar that it just─makes it _worse,_ and Lance curls into himself sitting on the stool, eyes squeezing shut as Keith’s glassy form fades back into nothing.

He feels a hand settle onto his back, a thumb stroking over the curved ridge of his spine the way Keith knew always calmed him down, and though it makes his breath slow and even out in muscle-memory response, he lets out a sob that sounds horribly loud in the silence of his kitchen.

 _“Lance.”_ Keith says, hesitant and slow and _him,_ and Lance probably couldn't stop crying if he wanted to.

“F-fuck,” he gasps into his palms, shaking. “Fuck, _fuck.”_

 _“You didn't swear this much before,”_ Keith muses, hand pressing flat against the curve of Lance’s spine. Lance laughs hollowly.

“You start caring less about that sort of thing when you're traumatized by your best friend’s death.” He mutters, nails digging into his skin, and it sinks deeper that Keith is really… _dead._ Ghost-haunting-Lance-because-god-likes-irony levels of _really dead._

Keith is silent for a long moment, the only evidence that he's still there the thumb skipping over Lance’s vertebrae.

 _“Best friend?”_ He says after a moment, parroting it back. Lance snorts, wiping at his cheeks.

“Really, that's the part of this you wanna comment on?” He challenges, and he hears the soft, familiar sound of Keith’s laughter in reply.

 _“Whatever,”_ he grumbles, disgruntled in a strangely fond way, like he can't find it in him to be annoyed by Lance right now. _“As long as you don't say you told me so about the ghost thing.”_

“Okay, but I─” Lance starts, interrupted by the tissue box on the counter being shoved into his lap.

 _“Shut up and blow your fuckin’ nose, Lance.”_ Keith says, and hearing his name in that voice all over again is overwhelming enough to make his jaw snap shut, following the request.

It probably says a lot about him that talking to a ghost in his kitchen is the closest to normal he's felt in months.

  
  
  


xi.

Lance is not usually one for non sequiturs. Parallel to Keith’s bouts of impulsivity and dumb courage, he'd rather think everything out before he says anything─even more so in delicate situations, when it _matters._ But, in hindsight, it's not as if things have been the usual lately.

“What happened to you?” He blurts out unthinkingly over a particularly strange game of cards. It feels more appropriate to the situation, somehow; he and Keith had been pushing as close to normal as they could, and all it really did was shift things further out of place. It wasn't easy to pretend everything was a-okay when your Go Fish buddy wasn't even corporeal.

 _“You had a funeral,”_ Keith replies, voice frighteningly steady. _“I think you know.”_

These are the moments in which everything before the second they sat at the counter and Lance said Keith’s name out loud for the first time in months begins to scare him. See, Lance knows _part_ of this story. He knows October twelfth, knows Keith’s solitary figure out by the canyon, knows him pressing an invisible fingertip to the steam on his bathroom mirror and drawing out words, but he doesn't─he doesn't know anything _before_ that. He has no timeline for the space in between his disappearance and his resurfacing at Lance’s house as something not-quite human. The times Keith talks about the whole thing so nonchalantly shake him for the sole reason that he's obviously thought about this a lot, enough to desensitize him to it, and Lance…wasn't _there_ when Keith realized he was dead.

Lance remembers small things, a lot of the time. He remembers promising Keith, when he was warm and real and _solid,_ that he'd always be there when he needed help.

He thinks he set himself up to be a liar.

“You know what I meant.” He says instead of any of this, setting his hand of cards down and looking at where he thinks Keith’s eyes are. Keith sets his cards down in turn, sensing the seriousness, and sweeps all of it into a messy pile. He’s quiet for what feels like hours but is most likely seconds.

 _“I remember seeing you at the café.”_ He says, gently and more vulnerable than Lance expected of him. _“It might've been obvious, but...I wasn't at my best. For a while.”_

“Did you─this lady says she saw you out on the canyon. They weren't sure if…” Lance starts, hesitant.

 _“If…?”_ Keith echoes, confused for a second. Lance can almost imagine his expression as he processes and arrives at understanding, breathing in sharply. _“Oh, fuck. Lance, no─I just wanted to be alone. Get some clarity, I guess.”_ He says quickly, pushing the cards out of his way with an annoyed noise and grasping at Lance’s hands.

“Okay.” Lance says, relief relaxing his frame. “Okay,” he repeats, fingers clutching Keith’s hold. “So then what─if you didn't, what happened?” Keith’s hands go slack against his. Lance has gotten good at reading his emotions through the feel of his movements, the way he used to with his expressions, and defeat is almost etched into Keith now.

_“I...I don't know. I don't remember much, just─darkness, for a while. Then I was here.”_

“You didn't know who I was,” Lance says plainly, not an accusation so much as it is filling the blanks. Keith fidgets idly with his hands.

 _“I didn't know who I was, either.”_ He replies, something Lance already knew but that still pricks painfully at his chest. Like he should've known from the second Keith manifested in his apartment from whatever _great beyond_ exists, should've─sensed it, or something, even before he smeared those words into the steam. Should've been able to _help─_

 _“Lance,”_ Keith interrupts his spiraling thoughts, words heavy with an emotion he can't place. _“I'm sorry.”_ He says, and it sound so incredibly sincere that Lance falters for a moment.

“For what?” He asks, voice hoarse and hollow. He can almost conjure the image of Keith in front of him, looking down at his palms the way he used to when he was trying not to be obvious about avoiding eye contact.

 _“I wish I stayed at the café.”_ He says, voice cracking around the syllables. _“I was being stubborn, and dumb, and you wanted to help but I just─fuck.”_ Keith sniffs, and Lance opens and closes his mouth a few times, not knowing what to say.

“I loved you.” Lance blurts out after a moment. His voice comes out calmer than he feels, but the worry shudders out of him with the relief of saying it out loud; not just to himself, this time. He waits out the excruciating silence that follows, almost wincing

 _“Past tense?”_ Keith finally speaks up. Lance cracks a hollow smile, taking in a shaky breath.

“I don't think it ever _could_ be past tense.” He laughs, wiping at his eyes when they well up dangerously. He flinches in surprise when he feels a hand settle against his cheek, but the calloused familiarity of it makes him sink into the touch without hesitance. Keith doesn't say anything; just holds steady with his hand over Lance’s cheek, thumb wiping away teardrops as they start to spill. Lance curls his hand around Keith’s, eyes squeezed shut and breath hiccuping in the silence they fall into.

In the end, the promise flips itself the other way around. It's always Keith, right when Lance needs him.

  
  


x.

Lance sees him in his periphery, flickering in and out. Black-brown hair tangled, eyes piercing.

Ghosts are not cold, like movies told him. Lance shivers.

  
  


vii.

Half a week after the ouija session, Lance dreams of dark eyes staring down at him at a café table and a grayish, heat-waved shadow hovering around them, arms outstretched.

 _“Hey,”_ a voice says, echoing strangely, but the tone is deep and familiar, rasping at the edges. _“Hey, asshole─”_

Lance snaps awake at nine thirty-seven, an hour and a half after he fell asleep, and stares at the red numbers blinking at him through the dark. He feels a weight against his arm, and as his eyes drift back closed, he sees a shadow moving next to him.

  
  


xi.

They find Keith’s body in the lake.

Lance doesn't think he'd have ever been able to live with himself if he never looked into what Keith told him. It wasn't hard to make the correlation from vague memories of water to the lake close by the canyon Keith had been seen near, and it was easy enough to pass it off as a passing _what-if._ It's not as if any of them thought Lance had purged the whole ordeal from his mind. They knew he was thinking about it. All of them thought about it. That was the hard part─ripping the fragile closure the empty-coffin funeral had given them apart at the seams, unearthing everything all over again.

When Lance was a kid, his mother told him not to pick at scabs. That it was better to leave them alone, let them sit as long as they needed and peel off on their own rather than wrench them off himself and let the blood well up anew.

 _“The only thing it does is prolong the hurt, mijo.”_ He remembers her saying, pressing a cartoon-printed bandage over the red-beaded wound. _“You need to let some things be. ¿Me entiendes?”_ She'd said, giving him a sharp look, and he'd nodded feverishly, quickly replying with a _‘claro, mamá’._

He guesses he isn't the greatest at following advice.

Lance is there to see it when they pull Keith’s body from the water, despite his better judgement. His skin is edged with unnatural blues and spider-thin veins, bright against his death-pale complexion─something you see in horror movies and bad crime shows. Something Lance would wince and avert his eyes from, groaning through Pidge calling him squeamish.

Part of him had thought that maybe, by some miracle, Keith would be fine when they found him. As if despite his presence in Lance’s home, this whole thing could've really just been some elongated fever dream born of grief and desperation, and he was on the edge of waking up to Keith─whole and smiling and alive.

He pinches himself twice on the drive to the morgue. He never wakes up.

They end up landing on the most likely option, someone close to closure but not quite─a rockslide on the cliffs at the edge of the lake that sent Keith tumbling into the impossibly deep water. It gets printed onto the updated report, the _missing person_ header replaced with _coroner’s,_ and each of them takes a copy to pretend it makes them feel better about any of it.

Lance remembers poking fun at him for not being able to swim, and truly does think that this whole thing is god laughing at him.

  
  


xii.

Lance dresses in the same stiff suit for the funeral. He really does hate it─he didn't want to pick something nice, felt like wearing it again for anything else would likely end in a panic attack in some fancy, over-perfumed bathroom, but part of him feels strangely guilty that he's wearing a shitty suit to his best friend’s funeral.

His shoulders tighten, visible in the mirror, when he feels phantom hands straightening his red tie and smoothing down his jacket at the shoulders. Lance breathes in sharply, and suppresses the urge to reach forward and _feel._

 _“You didn't give me a blue one, did you?”_ Keith’s voice says, quiet and echoing as it ever has been through the veil of...whatever separates Lance from the afterlife. If this _is_ afterlife.

“No,” He says, shivering when Keith’s hands brush against his knuckles, traveling down the sleeves of the suit. “You would've hated it. I know you better than that, man.” Keith hums, considering.

 _“Could you…”_ he starts, hesitant. His hands move back up to the knot of Lance’s tie, tracing the fold of it. _“Do you think you could put something blue in the coffin?”_

“Why?” Lance asks, choked. He feels Keith’s sigh against his cheeks, hears the exhale.

 _“I want─I want to keep you with me.”_ He says after a long moment. _“I don't know what's going to…”_ He trails off, but Lance can hear the continuation in the back of his mind. _What's going to happen to me._

“Will you still be here?” He asks, knowing the answer. Keith hums softly, like he really has to think about it.

 _“No,”_ he says. _“Are you going to be okay?”_ He knows this answer, too. Lance falls silent.

“I love you.” He says, voice squeezing in his throat, instead of answering him─though it's an answer in some ways. Part of him thinks Keith may have always known this; both how Lance will be without him, and why.

His reply comes in the form of hands cupping on his cheeks and lips pressed to his own─his eyes are fluttered shut before he feels it happen, like he knew without having to see Keith at all, and it sends electricity buzzing down his spine.

Ghosts are not cold, like movies told him.

Lance shivers.

  
  


xiii.

There’s a bouquet on the kitchen counter when Lance walks out of his bedroom. Not funeral-white lilies, but something oddly bright, sort of mismatched. Only two people have Lance’s apartment key─one of them is getting ready for the funeral, and the other one is dead.

Lance knows three things about Keith:

  1. He hates flowers.
  2. He doesn't know how to talk about feelings.
  3. He knows flower language.



He pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket with shaking hands, typing out the flower names he recognizes, and it takes every piece of him not to cry right there.

 

 _Azalea_ ─ _Take care of yourself for me._

 _Striped carnations_ ─ _I wish I could be with you._

 _Sweetpea_ ─ _Goodbye, and thank you for a lovely time._

 

“You did this,” Lance says, unsure of where Keith is but knowing intrinsically that he's _there._ “Where did you─Keith, _please,_ I─”

 _“I'm sorry,”_ Keith says, soft and low and much closer than Lance had anticipated. If he notices how Lance startles at the sound of his voice, it doesn't show. _“I wanted you to have them.”_ He says, and Lance can feel where his arms circle around him him by the weight and warmth of it, by how he holds on like it could keep him here. Like it could bring him back to life altogether.

But dead people stay dead, and as Lance reaches for the bouquet, the arms around him do not become corporeal.

He takes a sweetpea away from the bundle with shaking hands, feeling Keith's breath on his neck, and for a moment he can almost imagine that it's a necessary action; that Keith still has lungs to breathe with, and that these are not funeral flowers. A goodbye, and thank you for a lovely time.

“What am I supposed to do without you?” He asks, shuddering at the phantom feeling of Keith’s chest behind him, rising and falling in tandem with Lance’s own breathing. There is no heartbeat to speak of against Lance’s back, and Keith’s arms pull tighter around him.

 _“What you've always done,”_ he says, the fondness in his voice making Lance’s chest clench. One of Keith’s hands move towards the counter, drawing an azalea from the bouquet and pressing it firmly to Lance’s chest.

Keith doesn't know how to talk about feelings.

The flower speaks for him.

  
  


xiv.

There's a body in the coffin now.

They dress Keith in a suit; black from collar to toe, a familiar sight in unfamiliar form. His hair is left in loose waves against the soft white interior, brushed carefully away from where his eyelashes fan against his cheeks. He's beautiful, in a strange sort of way. Lance has never been the type to describe anything as “tragically beautiful”, but…that's what this is, isn't it? His own horrible little version of Romeo and Juliet.

When it's his turn to pay his respects, he tucks a blue handkerchief and a sweetpea into Keith’s jacket pocket, and the others do him the service of pretending they don't notice.

  
  


xv.

Lance watches the redwood coffin lower into the earth, and comes home to an empty apartment.

**Author's Note:**

> here's a [happy playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/phantomsfaced/playlist/7M58hQI3JzHzSGPSwoPhtQ?si=c-GgjieEQmSDHwQNSwLJDg) to relieve the angst


End file.
